“Never mind that,” the cowboy said. “Give me the shit.”
He lifted the bag up. As he extended his hand to the cab of the truck, he noticed that the cowboy was not looking at him, but past and behind him. Then the truck lurched forward, the rear frame of the door hitting his hand, spinning him around and sending the bag flying off beyond the dirt road and into the edge of the desert. The truck was already well underway when it got to the corner of the house, and its tires squealed some when it bent to the right and shot down the blacktop in the direction of the rose tree.
He saw the car slide to a stop about forty yards from him, the man in the summer suit jump out, and the car, with the door still open and flapping, accelerate after the truck. The man, in jumping from the car, had tripped; he fell, went with his roll, and came to his feet. A sleeve of his jacket was ripped, and he jerked at it with his other hand as he ran, breaking his stride. There was a gun in the hand of the arm with the ripped sleeve, and as Allen turned toward the house he saw the gun disappear as the man pulled at the sleeve to rip it away and free himself.
In two strides Allen was over the low picket fence and in the sand. When he got to the screen door, he ripped it off its hinges as the hook lock pulled loose, and it flew back behind him. The force of the wrenching set the house into slight motion.
“Shit!” he heard, and then a crashing, as the man with the torn sleeve and the gun got tangled in the flying door.
He could see the light at the end of the house, and he headed for it. He could hear the bottles, fall and roll and break above him. He passed an old woman who was half risen from her crocheting of a tablecloth at a large oak dining-room table. He hit the screen door at the front of the house with both of his hands out; his right hand ripped through the screening, and the other hit against the left frame, sending the door free of the latch and open. It slapped like a rifle shot against the side of the house.
He cleared the front stoop in the air, heard the tinkle and crash of bottles above and behind him, ran down the front walk, crossed the street, hit along the side of the house across from the bottle house, and then came to the rose tree fence. He vaulted over it, using the howdy pardner seat bench, landing on both feet in the dirt near the rose tree itself, its huge trunk in front of him. There were no visitors, and he grabbed onto a low limb and climbed up into the rose tree, scrambling into the higher branches, where he saw that he could reach the roof of the house against which the enclosure was built. He reached for the eave, the hot shingles burning his fingers, and hoisted himself up and over. There was a large, uncapped chimney rising a good six feet up from the middle of the peaked roof, and he headed for it.
He moved around the chimney; it was a good three-and-a-half-feet square, but he felt exposed on all sides, and he grabbed at the edge of the chimney above him and pulled himself up to the top of it. It had one flue; it was open, and he saw light below.
He climbed down into the chimney, searching for a purchase on the edges of the brick interior. He found small narrow ledges for his feet, and then he crouched down.
He was breathing heavily, but he could hear the bottles. They were still falling over, some breaking, some rolling around on the flat roof; some hit against each other, tinkling. They sounded like a massive and airy wind chime at times, at others like a piece of odd contemporary music. His breathing was the bass line, the rhythm. A line of bottles would fall like dominoes, some ringing others-the darker ones, he thought, having a hollow sound, the newer ones like crystal. They fell, rolled, crashed against each other, dropped from the roof with dull thuds. And then he held his breath.
He heard the man coming, could hear him opening the door in the rose tree fence, could even hear his breathing. The breathing settled quickly as the man moved around the tree. He heard the final ripping away of the sleeve and a small click. The safety or the hammer, he thought. He heard the man scuffling as he climbed the tree. Then he felt a small quiver in the chimney as the man came up over the edge of the roof and onto it. He heard his feet sliding and scraping on the shingles as he moved to the peak of the roof, then a firmer thudding as he walked along the caps to the chimney. Then the man stopped, and all he could hear was his deep, regular breathing.
He stood very still where he was, looking up. Above him he could see the open sky, and as he watched it, a dark element of clouds began to drift across it into the framed field of his vision. The clouds were very dark, almost pure black and as thick as oil smoke. He heard the man shift around a little as he looked, felt him circle the chimney still looking. Then he stopped. He imagined him looking up at the clouds as he was, their attention focused on the same issue. They were very close together, and he felt embarrassed in his secrecy, wrong and shy. The clouds had moved in, and the patch of sun that had entered the chimney, oddly exposing him, was gone. He felt his hair lifted slightly, his scalp touched by a cool breeze. Then he heard the sound of gunfire. He thought at first that it was thunder or more mock Old West battling, but he heard the man suck in his breath and shift quickly and pause; he could feel his attention.
“Christ!” he heard the man say sharply, and then heard him scrambling down from the peak. He felt the roof return to its architecture as the man left it. He heard the tree groan and the dull thud as the man’s feet hit the ground. The door to the rose tree fence ground on its hinges a little as the man opened it, and then he could not hear anything at all.
He waited. He remembered living in Bisbee, twenty-five miles from here, when he was in high school. Bisbee was at the top of the low mountains, the southern end of the Continental Divide before it dipped into Mexico. In the winter, it got cold and snowed in Bisbee. But he did not think that it got so cold in Tombstone, at least not cold enough to warrant a chimney of this size. He was not sure about that, though. Another odd thing was the locked screen doors. It was the middle of the day, and he could not figure why she had them locked. He shook himself back, realizing he was beginning to daydream. The first question was, had they got any significant look at him. Second, did they have any line on his car. He did not take time to figure the chances. The car would tell the story; if they got that he was sunk. There was enough in the trunk and the glove compartment to nail him. Hysteria began to creep up in him as he thought of Melinda, the possibility of not making it East with her, but he pushed it back down.
He rose from his crouch, put his elbows on the brick outside of the flue, and hoisted himself up until he was sitting on the bricks with his legs dangling into the hole. He could see the top of the rose tree and the street a few houses away. He knew if he looked around he would be able to see back to the place where the truck had stopped. He was too exposed, and he got his legs out of the hole, turned, and lowered himself down the side of the chimney to the peak of the roof. He saw there was still nobody visiting the rose tree, and though the enclosure made him uneasy, he climbed from the roof to the tree’s limbs, working his way down, and dropped to the ground. It was much darker than it had been before in the rose tree enclosure; the dark clouds hung high and heavy up through the branches. They had moved in over the town and stopped.